Editor’s Note: Steve’s father, Paul Louie, was one of the three founders of the Chinese Historical Society of Southern California (CHSSC) – fifty years ago in 1975. Born in 1918 in Seattle, Paul was an ordained Baptist minister and worked for L.A. County’s Human Relations Commission. Steve’s mother, Emma Woo Louie, was editor of our Gum Saan Journal and author of Chinese Americans Names: Tradition and Transition (1998). Steve was born in 1949 in San Francisco and part of the Asian American political movement of the 1960-1970s. Steve went to work at the Postal Service to help organize workers in 1973 and retired 31 years later. Steve is co-editor of The Asian Americans: The Movement and the Moment (2001). Steve Louie’s “Asian American Movement Collection, 1930-1980” is housed under Special Collections at the UCLA Young Library, gifted in 1997. This was excerpted from an interview in early 2023 that was edited by Steve.
My Father, Paul Louie
My father was Paul Louie (1918-2009), and my mother is Emma Woo Louie (1926-). My father was born in Seattle. His father, Louie Loy, entered Portland three months before the passage of the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act. He was just able to slide in. But Grandfather went under several interrogations and investigations and traveled back and forth to China, so there’s quite a government file on him. He even had White businessmen testifying to Grandfather’s great business acumen. My dad was able to do a lot of research about him with the help of my mom. We discovered more about him when we cleaned-up the family apartment. The family occupied a ground floor apartment at 4 Canton Alley since 1909. This was part of the historic Kong Yick Building 公益大廈 that is now the space of Seattle’s Wing Luke Museum. When we were cleaning up, we discovered four personal boxes that showed more of who my grandfather was. My grandfather spoke fluent English but none of my aunts and uncles even knew. Grandfather had written a personal dictionary in his beautiful handwriting that stacked over fourteen linear inches.
My father did extensive research and wrote a limited-run book entitled, My Father’s Rice Bowl (2006), available at the Asian American Collection in the Ethnic Studies Library at UC Berkeley. To honor his parents, Dad established the Louie Loy and Leong Shee Scholarship at San Francisco State University for Equal Opportunity Program (EOP) students.
We were told that “Louie Loy” was Grandfather’s “milk name”.[1] We are not sure. But that is the name on his documents and in early Seattle city directories. He emigrated from Zhongshe 中社 in Toisan (Taishan台山). Grandfather came when he was about 18 years old and learned English from a Baptist missionary school in Portland. He soon moved to Seattle in the International District.
My grandmother, Leong Shee, was a younger woman who gave birth to thirteen children. Paul is the fifth of the eleven living children.[2] She came in 1909 into an arranged marriage. They had to be married in Vancouver. The family spoke Toisanese and Cantonese. I’m amazed at how much I understand of both dialects – which isn’t very much. My parents tried sending me to Chinese language school. That didn’t work out. I got kicked out for being bad.
The family fortunes rose, and then fell, rose again, and then fell permanently. At some point, Grandfather was a tailor. He made some money after he became a merchant. He ran a women’s undergarment store with his cousin. Unfortunately, the cousin ran off with the money and sent the Louie family into a spiral.
When my dad was in junior high, he was kind of a pool hustler, I always heard. Some of his siblings ran an illegal pinochle joint. It cracked us up immensely that Dad later became a minister. Actually, Grandfather was also an itinerant preacher in the Chinese communities near Seattle.
Dad graduated from James Garfield High School, and then received a partial scholarship to Linfield College, a Baptist school in McMinnville, Oregon. The school was fairly conservative, and photographs show Dad as one of the only non-Whites. His older brother and sisters paid for my dad’s education. I know my aunts never begrudged that. One of my aunts was a hairdresser. Another went to business school and became a secretary. We had a picture of her with hair in place and in tweeds and low stacked heels. We would tease her and say, “But, Auntie, that doesn’t look like you at all.” And she answered vehemently, “I hated that. I hated that.”
Then Dad went to Harvard Divinity School. He graduated with a Master of Science in Theology in 1945. He and others established the Silver Bay Chinese Christian Youth Conferences in August of 1944.[3] Dad was chair for three years.
Dad met Beulah Ong Kwoh (also Beulah Quo) at the Lake Tahoe Chinese Christian Youth Conferences in the 1940s. Beulah is the mother of Stewart Kwoh of Asian Americans Advancing Justice. Beulah was involved in leading these conferences and spoke out against the internment of Japanese Americans.[4] Dad also met [Judge] Delbert and Dolores Wong near that time. The Wongs had four children.[5] The Kwohs and the Wongs would be some of the first Chinese Americans moving into the Silver Lake area in the 1950s. My parents were also friends with Dr. Ruby Ling and Hoover Louie.[6] These were among the Los Angeles Chinese American leaders of the 1950s. And many of us who were activists after 1968 knew of each other through our families.
Dad went to San Francisco in 1947 to work as the youth leader of the Chinese YMCA in Chinatown on Sacramento Street. He met my mother who was also active with these Chinese Christian conferences.
Mom was born in 1926 and was raised in San Francisco’s Chinatown. She went to nursing school in San Jose after high school. She had thought that as a nurse, she would be able to travel around the nation and around the world. But that never came to pass. She loved nursing school and stayed in touch with her classmates. She shaped us a lot as my dad worked long hours as a minister, often in late meetings or meeting with families in the evenings.
Mom and Dad married in 1948, and I, the eldest of four, was born in 1949. From 1950 to 1955, Dad was the minister of the Chinese Presbyterian Church in Oakland’s Chinatown – although he was ordained by the American Baptist Church. Switching denominations was common amongst ministers serving ethnic communities. My father tried to preach in the Chinese language, but he was advised not to and decided it wouldn’t be a good idea (laughs).
Then Dad served in Berkeley and then, in Davis. We moved every two or three years. My father believed in racial integration. He felt he and the family should walk the talk. So after Berkeley, he served White churches. He was the minister of Christian education and when the main minister changed, the associate ministers would be shifted. And we would move.
We came down to Southern California when I was in the sixth grade around 1961. I remember being here during the JFK assassination. The family stayed in La Cañada until 1966. Dad then served a church in Sylmar.[7] Near this time, my father became very disappointed with the glacial pace of the Presbyterian Church in supporting the Black Civil Rights Movement, so he left the Church. He wanted to do something else and be more active. He served one year as director with the Economic Opportunity Commission in San Francisco. In 1971 – until he retired in 1986 – he served as a consultant on the staff of the Los Angeles County Human Relations Commission.[8] He was the Asian American representative. It was during this time that he helped establish Chinatown Service Center, Chinatown Branch Library, Chinatown Teen Post, and the Chinese Historical Society of Southern California (1975).[9]
Learning from My Parents
Editor’s Note: La Cañada is a suburb northwest of Pasadena. La Cañada Unified School District was separated from Pasadena Unified in 1961; La Cañada High was established in 1963. After the predominantly White La Cañada students split from the racially-mixed Muir High of the Pasadena Unified School District, Muir became known as a de facto segregated school. Pasadena Unified is the only district west of the Mississippi River that was under court order to desegregate after the 1970 Spangler v. Pasadena City Board of Education case.
Race was a big deal for me growing up. I graduated from Sylmar High School in 1967. I only spent a year there; I had transferred from La Cañada schools where I was since the sixth grade. At Sylmar, it was the first time I remember living in a community – after Berkeley – that wasn’t lily White. The school had about 30% African American and a lot of second generation Chinese and third generation Japanese Americans. But at La Cañada, there was only one other Chinese family and one Chicano family at the high school.
To be honest, I was mad at my father for a long time. I felt he was obsessed with racial integration but that just made our lives as young kids miserable. In the first two years we were in La Cañada, every time we went somewhere, heads would swivel to look at us. In Davis, a pack of about sixty kids tore down the goal posts on the UC Davis campus on Halloween. My father found out and confronted me. I said, “How did they know it was me?” Dad said, “Think about it; you were the only Chinese.” My father said to me, “You cannot do things to bring shame to the Chinese American community.” But I didn’t want to bear that cross. That was too much for one person to represent an entire race.
I never doubted I was Chinese. My parents instilled a lot of ethnic pride in us. They said, “Never doubt who you are and what you are.” But I was very frustrated and angry at the racism I encountered. My character was that I had to fight back against racism in an instant: either with words or with fists to defend myself.
I think I fought against White boys every other day in La Cañada. I was being bullied constantly in the hallways. In junior high, they started locking me in gym lockers because I was so small. I would have to bang on the locker until someone let me out. Or they would use a cigarette lighter to heat up the metal handle of the locker and force my hands onto it to burn the skin. They heated up other objects, too… I never told my parents. One time, I was coming out of swinging doors of the boys’ bathroom. I heard “NOW,” and they slammed that door into my face. The door crashed, and my glasses were driven into my forehead. I still have a scar. The Boys Vice Principal was very sympathetic, but he couldn’t do anything since none of the White boys would talk.
But I definitely took revenge. I hollowed out each cigarette in a pack and put a firecracker with a short fuse in them, then put tobacco back in to hide the firecracker. I left this cigarette pack with matches casually by the bathroom sink. Minutes later, I heard “boom, boom, boom”. Two boys had to be sent to the hospital for smoke inhalation. Soon after, I was immediately called into the Vice Principal’s office as this was only three days after the bathroom door incident. He said, “Do you know anything about this, Steve?” And I looked at him with the best angelic face I could muster and said, “No, I have no idea. But I’m glad. Could you find out who did this so I can thank him?” The Vice Principal said, “There’s going to be a lot of pressure on this case. So, if you know who did this, please tell him to be very careful.”
In another incident, an African American friend and I went to Glendale’s John Birch Society office.[10] We asked for membership. The secretary was dumbfounded. I said, “I admire the ideals of the John Birch Society so much, and I want to apply for membership.” My friend said more. The secretary called for her superior who said, “Get out of here.”
When the 1965 Watts Riot happened, La Cañada went berserk. All the guns and ammunition were sold out within hours. The stores were even empty of water and food stuffs. When the 210 freeway extension plans into La Cañada were discussed, residents were afraid that this would lead to Blacks gaining access to the community.[11] La Cañada was a terrible place for anyone who wasn’t White in those years.
La Cañada was the worst place I’ve ever lived. Hearing how many Asians live there nowadays, I can’t believe how much La Cañada has changed! There’s about 30% Asians now living in La Cañada, and it is considered quite liberal. But I was in the first yearbook of La Cañada High, and I had a totally different experience.
My parents got their first TV in the 1950s and we watched the Civil Rights Movement unfold. We always talked about the events around the dinner table. They said, “This is important. This is important for you as Chinese Americans. What do you think?” My younger siblings were probably not getting it, but I remember these conversations. My parents even got me to leaflet against the 1964 Proposition 14.[12] I was very conscious of the meaning of this Proposition; it was to nullify the Rumford Act and allow racial covenants. I knew that my parents couldn’t buy a house in La Cañada. Residents even signed petitions against us! When we walked up to review a house, people would be rude and ask stupid racist questions. I couldn’t understand these contradictions, “Why do people hate us?” My parents would answer my questions. They said, “This is discrimination. This is why.”
We finally got a house because a church member, Gus Frank, who was a contractor, built us a three- bedroom house – at cost – at 725 Craig Avenue in 1961. My parents sold the house in 1966 to move to Sylmar.
I always felt that our neighbors were nice to my parents but in a patronizing way; they were doing their “good deed”. I asked my mother about this much later, and she said, “In some cases, you may be right. But there’s always good genuine people, Steven.” My parents had a small group of friends in La Cañada who they kept in touch with over the years, which told me they were genuine friends.
My parents had Chinese American friends; they were very sociable. We even entertained Chinese foreign students at Cal Tech; I remember one time my father pointed out a name of one of these students that eventually worked on the atomic bomb in China.
The Asian American Movement
I went to college from Sylmar. Like most kids that age, I was really aimless. But my father had drilled into us that education and college were important. I wanted to go to Berkeley. My dad said, “No. You need to go to a smaller school.” He said I could go to Berkeley, but he wouldn’t pay for it (laughs). I went to Occidental College in Eagle Rock, founded by the Presbyterian Church. My father even knew Oxy’s Dean of Students. My father liked their ideals. I had a good time. I got into deep conversations with people older and smarter than me. They fostered an environment where people could question each other and the long-held beliefs in society.
I fell in with the radicals on campus. It was an exciting time on campuses. We had a Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) chapter focusing against the Vietnam War. What really helped me was one time, I was chatting with Phoebe On Louie’s daughters (about my age) and they said, “You know Asian Americans are organizing against the War.”[13] I was stopped on my tracks. I hadn’t heard of any “Orientals” – the term still used most widely in the mid-sixties – organizing collectively. They introduced me to Ron Wakabayashi; he was with Oriental Concern.[14] He told me that people were working on Gidra, a new Asian American newspaper that would be coming out soon. He also told me about the Asian American Political Alliance in Los Angeles, and that there were meetings I could attend. After that, I helped form the Asian group at Occidental College.
I grew up with a chip on my shoulders. I had always fought against racist acts individually, but always felt alone in doing that. But racism, which I was constantly trying to understand, seemed bigger than one person. I heard Yuji Ichioka and Emma Gee had started a new group, Asian American Political Alliance (AAPA) at Berkeley in May of 1968. They had come out of the Peace and Freedom Party.[15] Yuji is the person credited for pushing this new term and political identity at that time: “Asian American”. Today, we forget that it was such a big statement then. AAPA came down to Los Angeles within months – before Yuji and Emma came down to teach at UCLA. The student strikes at Berkeley and San Francisco State held conferences and drew students from UCLA and the other UC campuses. I went to an Asian American Political Alliance coordinating committee meeting in Los Angeles. Ron Wakabayashi, Larry Kubota, Dan and June Kuramoto, and Alan and Yvonne Wong Nishio were there.[16] They said, “You should do something at your school.” And I thought, “You are right.”
The first demonstration I went to was coordinated by AAPA. It was at Disneyland and against S.I. Hayakawa. Hayakawa was President of SF State (1968-1973) and made a speech there. He was a militant opponent of ethnic studies strikers and anti-Vietnam War demonstrators. I committed to go immediately, but I still had to think about it, and I was a little nervous.
Because of this AAPA meeting, I went back to Oxy and started the Asian Alliance organization. We started with the name “Oriental Interest Alliance.” Using the term “Asian” was political then. I had to learn to compromise. There were about two or three of us who went through the dorms and talked to everybody of Asian descent. I think there were only sixty students of Asian descent on the whole campus. The students who had small business or working-class backgrounds were willing to join us. But the Asian students from Hawaii were a bit more hesitant to join the group, and I started to learn how the situation in Hawaii differed from the mainland. We were a tiny group. We had less than a dozen students. And for that membership, I had to water down our statement of purpose. But it was worth doing because forming that group stirred up a lot of discussion on campus, which was a good thing. Names can be changed, and that name was changed a couple of years later. Getting people to think about the status quo and their position in society was totally worth it. I also helped form the first Third World coalition at Occidental.
In my freshman year, I probably thought of myself as Chinese American. But my father had told me about the Japanese camps. He told me the Chinese had to wear buttons that said “I am Chinese”, and he thought the whole thing was shameful. I think my dad had no hesitancy working with other Asian ethnic groups. I was relating more to Japanese Americans partly because my Chinese language skills were poor; I couldn’t communicate that well in Chinatown. There were college students at UCLA, USC and Oxy – who began a tutoring program at Castelar School in 1969, the Asian American Tutorial Project (AATP).[17] I didn’t want to do the Castelar tutoring because my dad suggested it (laughs).
At Oxy, we demanded an Asian American studies course, and the campus hired Franklin Odo in 1968. Years later, Franklin told me, “I was only 29 years old and had not finished my dissertation on Japanese feudalism. I didn’t know anything about Asian American studies. I was just trying to get into this new field.”[18] But Frank turned out to be one of the real leaders in the Asian American community nationwide and left a huge mark as a leader and mentor.
In the summer of 1969, I got this Richter Fellowship travel grant. My sponsoring professor was a sociologist from UCLA. I was supposed to turn in weekly reports of my studies. I was supposed to study the “movement”, but I wasn’t an observer, I was completely involved. I traveled to San Francisco, Chicago, Boston, New York, and Washington, D.C. I saw students all over the nation coming into political motion. The Movement was not centrally directed. There was so much emotion and spontaneity. It was at CCNY and elite Yale. I worked with the Boston Asian Alliance which included students from Harvard, MIT, and Brandeis. I met May and Wilma Chan in Boston. I was in New Haven with Don Nakanishi, Lowell Chun-Hoon, Glenn Omatsu and Rocky Chin, among others. In New York, I worked with Asian Americans for Action (Triple A) with Yuri Kochiyama and Tak and Kazu Iijima, parents of Chris Iijima.[19] They wanted to take a stand against the Vietnam War. That was such a multigenerational group.
The Asian Movement was so grassroots. I realized I didn’t have to fight on my own as we could work together to make change. That was radical.
I was so impressed with the Movement that I never returned to complete my B.A. When I told my professor that I was going to drop out, he said, “Go for it.” He was a great guy. He covered my back. He never gave away my sources. And because of him, I never had to pay back the $30-40,000 I spent that year. He said, “I know you will make your contribution to the community.” When I returned, I stayed a while with my parents and then moved to San Francisco to work with Asian Community Center and then with Wei Min She (WMS). I never looked back.
I came back to the West Coast in late 1970 but returned to the east coast for a while. I came back again in 1971, driving with Glenn Omatsu from New York.[20] Glenn dropped out of Yale graduate school. He wanted to get involved in the Movement in San Francisco. We shared an apartment in San Francisco with two others for a while.
In 1967, armed members of the Black Panther Party had a protest in front of the Sacramento Capitol. They said, “The time has come for Black people to arm themselves.” Their attitude really spoke to me. Because of my parents, I had followed Martin Luther King’s activities for a long time. I saw the Selma March and all of the King’s stuff on TV. I got it. But passive nonresistance didn’t speak to me. Not when I was getting beaten up on a regular basis in school by White kids who thought it was fun to bully an Asian American kid. Microaggressions, my ass. I was impressed with the Panthers’ politics, their breakfast program, and their attitude. That is, in a nutshell, the difference between my father and me. He was Martin Luther King, and I thought they weren’t radical enough. My father instilled in me this ethnic pride and the knowledge that discrimination was wrong. I may not have realized it until later, but when both my father and mother got involved against Proposition 14 as a group effort, I was subconsciously very influenced. I was primed. I was completely ready to move to the next step, and it didn’t take long to appear in the late 60s.
Growing the Asian American New Left
Him Mark Lai has done some research work about Chinese American left groups from the 1930s. Karl Yoneda, a Japanese American, joined the U.S. Communist Party in the 1920s. Asian Americans before us and our parents gave us a base, but my generation started taking that base in different directions.
In San Francisco, I worked first with the Japanese Community Youth Council (JCYC) – first established in 1969. But I got more involved in Chinatown through the Asian Community Center (ACC). UC Berkeley’s Asian Studies Field Office had established the ACC in the summer of 1970 as a program to “serve the people.” I knew the Asian Studies Field Office people from my Richter Fellowship days, right after the Berkeley and San Francisco State ethnic studies strikes. The ACC was located in the basement of the International Hotel on Kearny Street. The I-Hotel was primarily a low-income residential building – or SRO (Single Room Occupancy) – for Filipino manongs.[21] The landlord, Milton and Meyer, Co. with support from the Kuomintang-supported Chinese Consolidated Benevolent Association, wanted to evict the residents and redevelop the property. This fight went on until 1977.
I joined Wei Min She (Organization of the People為民社) when it was founded by ACC in 1971. Wei Min She was an Asian American Marxist-Leninist group. We wrote this program to appeal to a broad cross-section of Chinatown San Francisco.
WHAT WE SEE
- We see the breakdown of our community and families.
- We see our people suffering from malnutrition, tuberculosis, and high suicide rates.
- We see the destruction of our cultural pride.
- We see our elders forgotten and alone.
- We see our Mothers and Fathers forced into meaningless jobs to make a living.
- We see American society preventing us from fulfilling our needs.
WHAT WE WANT
- We want adequate housing, medical care, employment, and education.
WHAT WE BELIEVE
- To solve our community problems, all Asian people must work together.
- Our people must be educated to move collectively for direct action.
- We will employ any effective means that our people see necessary.[22]
I liked what WMS was doing; I liked the people; and I liked their general direction and political outlook. It was what I wanted to do, to get involved in organizing. That was my burning thing. The Movement was really young at that time. By the mid-1970s, I estimate there were only about seventy Asian American progressive organizations around the nation that I had documented while I was traveling. Most were led by students. It was a mass movement – in the definition that it was grassroots-based. I wanted to be part of this. For someone like myself who fought against racism on such a personal level, I didn’t want to be isolated anymore. I felt this was important for me personally but I also knew it was historical. I thought it was incredible.
As a teenager, I had leafletted against Proposition 14 with my parents! Then, I did not understand the link between organizing and my personal rebellion against racism. But by the time I was in San Francisco, I wanted to be part of the Movement. I wanted to take this message to other people that as “Asian Americans” we can organize against racism and capitalism. We could fight back.
Full disclosure: I had no idea what all this meant. I didn’t have a full-blown understanding of Marxism. I didn’t understand Mao Zedong and his contributions to China and the world. We all saw idealistic images of Mao swimming in the Yangzi River and Mao with his Red Guards in the mainstream newspapers of the 1960s. But what I admired was that Mao was introduced to me by the Black Panther Party. We were all reading Marx, Lenin, Mao, Fanon, Guevara, and others. But I don’t think many people at all knew where we were going and what was next. It was totally organic. People would hear about what other folks were doing, and they would be inspired. For example, Boston and New York had established their own Asian American Political Alliance, but they were doing things relevant to their local level. There was no mastermind; there were no general directives. People were responding to the general situation that people faced around the country.
Marxist-Leninist groups started developing amongst Asian Americans in the early 1970s. In New York, you had Triple A and I Wor Kuen (IWK 義和拳). In San Francisco, there was the WMS and the Red Guards. In the Los Angeles area, you had collectives like East Wind. And these are just the early ones. These groups were accelerating the pace of political understanding.
The Asian American Movement was also broad-based and was composed of many different political currents. The new left groups were only part of this whole Movement. Our ideas and programs took strong and then radical positions about society and its racism. But history shows that these radical ideas of the Movement are commonplace and mainstream today.
Marxist-Leninism gave me a framework to think about the status of people of color in American society. I began to connect how racism and sexism is related to capitalism, and vice versa. To organize effectively, we need to know what we are doing and why. Capitalism was in crisis in the 1970s. Between the Vietnam War, Watergate, and the rising prices of milk and gas, we were in crisis. I thought then – and still think – that Marxism is really on the side of the people and community. Congress and the feds take the side of big business. In the I-Hotel fight, we could see big businesses concerned only about profits, and even arguing that making profits for themselves would help the community and the tenants. There was never any intention to help residents and poor people. Marxist-Leninism informed me on how we needed to fight for workers’ rights, for people’s health care, for community, and for housing – against capitalist interests.
I do regret that we didn’t work together better. The Asian American Marxist-Leninist groups argued amongst ourselves. We argued about using revolutionary rhetoric when we tried to connect with ordinary people. Who do we ally with? Who are our friends, and who are our enemies? Now I think, would we have been more successful with the I-Hotel issue had we not been arguing amongst ourselves so much? At the same time, the Movement isn’t the source of friction in the political world. You only have to look at American society broadly or American political institutions in particular to see it’s a general phenomenon.
We were young. I was in my early 20’s, and I didn’t think about my career or future for several years. I was completely focused on growing the Movement.
For money, I worked odd jobs here and there. I got paid cash for making tofu in the early morning. By 1973, I got a job at the post office specifically so I could organize, and I also needed to think about making a living. San Francisco post office workers were heavily Chinese and Black after World War II; the government gave preference to military veterans. I was deeply inspired by Mao and Zhou Enlai who had tried to shed their class background to be with the workers. Who knew I would stay with the post office for 31 years? I was on the loading docks for about fifteen years and later started working in other departments.
I married in 1974. We bought our first house in 1976. At that time in San Francisco City, it was cheaper to buy than to rent. Our kids came in 1978 and 1985. Of course, the economics of housing – and of surviving – have really changed.
Leaving the Left
By the early 1980s, I was burnt out. WMS had become part of the Revolutionary Communist Party (RCP). I did not like where RCP was going. There were so many contradictions between what they espoused and how they acted. By the 1980s, many Asian American progressives were no longer in Marxist groups. This was caused by an accumulation of many factors. There were personal factors. There were internal and external factors that are outside the scope of this interview. There was Reaganism. There was our own sectarianism. There was the coming of professional social service agencies and non-profits. In the 1970s, the non-profits were small and on shoestring budgets. By the 1980s, the non-profits were being institutionalized and changed to be run in capitalist ways with bookkeepers, accountants, boards, professional leadership, etc. Of course, community organizations should be well-run, efficient, and be accountable to the people they serve. But now you have non-profit leadership and staff who want to be paid – and paid well – to be “organizers”. In my mind, that is antithetical. Today, non-profits are not organizing people to have progressive or revolutionary thinking. They are organizing expensive charity dinners to flatter donors and show they are part of the status quo and not challenging it! Could it be that the Rockefeller Foundation and other “philanthropists” co-opted the Movement and its nascent political power?
I’ve stayed involved with young people. I’ve worked with seven or eight generations of Asian American activists. I am involved in informal networks. I did even go to many meetings on a tenant housing issue in Oakland Chinatown. But I was not the fulltime activist I once was, and I fall asleep too early to go to late night meetings.
In the 1990s, Dr. Don Nakanishi at UCLA’s Asian American Studies invited Glenn Omatsu and I to co-teach a course at UCLA. This led to Omatsu and I collaborating with Mary Uyematsu Kao on the anthology, Asian Americans: The Movement and the Moment (2001). When the class ended, there was a conference in Los Angeles that got an informal group of folks, including Movement organizers and students together. We thought we needed to have a book on the Movement. Eventually, Glenn and I became the editors. We banned rhetoric (laughs). We agreed to edit lightly. I did most of the work tracking down tons of people to get rights for their photos. This was forty years after the photos were taken; it was a huge treasure hunt. Mary did a great job with the graphics. Glenn and I got a good range of people to write. We didn’t just want leaders; we wanted everyday organizers and participants. Russell Leong came up with that name when the three of us were racking our brains for a title.
Reflections
Today, there is a diversity of political activism in the Asian American community that ranges from extreme right-wing forces who are “always-Trumpers” to left-wing activists. There are growing Asian American forces in electoral politics and social services agencies. Most of the activities are within mainstream and establishment channels. What would have been radical fifty years ago is now generally acceptable in the community. But non-profits can only do so much. They provide for immediate needs but do not help people develop the consciousness to resist and fight back. The “Movement” of the 1960-70s is long gone. We were radicals; we were rogues. In the 1960s, the term “Asian American” was radical, similar to “Black Power.” Today, it is more of a demographic label, no longer a challenge to the status quo.
There are many Asian Americans in the climate movement or in other multinational movements, and this is likely to be a continuing pattern – and a good one – as Asians join with others in this society to fight for the issues that affect everyone.
My father and I did not talk for a while. Part of that was just father-son stuff. But part of it was bitterness on my part that I had to grow up living with a lot of racist bullying and discrimination because of his choice to be an integrating force by moving to Caucasian communities. I understand that those experiences and my responses to them formed a part of who I am, and who I became. But I didn’t enjoy those years, and there are scars that I carry with me inside. But part of growing up and maturing, for me, was understanding those experiences in the context of growing up in the kind of society that uses differences to promote division.
My dad’s advice to me to turn the other cheek only made things worse for me. But I know his work helping the people in the Los Angeles Chinese and Asian communities was anything but turning the other cheek. He left the Presbyterian Church out of frustration and disgust that “his” church of the 1960s would not engage in the growing civil rights movement. He felt he needed to be involved in bettering the circumstances of the Chinese and Asian communities in this country because of what we have faced here, and that’s what he did. And it used to regularly blow my mind that friends of mine in the Los Angeles Movement told me that they liked working with my old man. I had no words the first time someone told me that.
When I look back, I think I could’ve learned more from my folks. The older I got, the more I appreciated their perspective. And I have to admire the way they handled their lives. I admire how they managed conflict and disagreements. It isn’t lost on me the influence they had on me, personally and politically. Many friendships my parents made influenced and connected me with the same community.
My dad could be a character. When we were teenagers, he didn’t want my brother and I to even drive. But in the early 1980s, he gave me a used truck. He said, “This truck is for you to use in your activism.” I thought, “You sly dog…” He knew I was burning out, and that was his way of encouraging me to keep doing what I was doing.
[1] From Wikipedia under “Chinese Names” accessed 11 December 2022: Traditionally, babies were named a hundred days after their birth… Upon birth, the parents often use a “milk name” 乳名 —typically employing diminutives like xiǎo 小 (“little”) or doubled characters — before a formal name is settled upon, often in consultation with the grandparents. The milk name may be abandoned but is often continued as a form of familial nickname. A tradition sometimes attached to the milk name is to select an unpleasant name, to ward off demons who might wish to harm the child.
[2] The Louie children are Jennie, Alma, Peter, Fannie, Paul, Rosa, Esther, Phillip, Lily, Marjorie, and James.
[3] Near the mid-century, there were African American, Japanese American, and Chinese American retreats for Christian youth. Paul Louie documents that the Chinese Young People’s Christian Conference sponsored an early meeting at Lake Tahoe Zephyr Point Presbyterian Conference Grounds in July 1933. A 1932 meeting was held at the YWCA-owned Asilomar Conference Grounds near Monterey, California. The Chinese retreats became known as the “Tahoe Conferences” organized by the Chinese Christian Youth Conference (CCYC). See Louie, Paul. “Chinese Christian Youth Conferences in America, with a Focus on the East Coast.” Chinese America: History and Perspectives (2001): 47. Gale Academic OneFile (accessed December 11, 2022). https://link.gale.com/apps/doc/A72890623/AONE?u=googlescholar&sid=bookmark-AONE&xid=e3c18f00. Also see Steve Louie’s “Part II: East Wind: A Progressive Chinese American Voice 1945-1948” in East Wind. https://eastwindezine.com/east-wind-a-progressive-chinese-american-voice-1945-1948/
[4] Beulah Ong (1923-2002) was born in Stockton, received a BA from Berkeley and a Master’s from the University of Chicago. Her master’s thesis entitled “The Occupational Status of American-Born Chinese Male College Graduates” was published in the American Journal of Sociology. She married Edwin Kwoh, a businessman. She used an alternative spelling of her last name, Quo, as non-Chinese thought KWOH were the initials of a radio station. She was an actress and an activist. She co-founded East West Players in 1965.
[5] Delbert Earl Wong (1920-2006) was the first judge of Chinese American descent in the continental United States. Dolores Wing Wong was a psychiatric social worker from Vallejo, and supporter of many Asian American organizations in Los Angeles. See Gum Saan Journal, Special Edition 2004 at gumsaanjournal.com. The children include Dr. Shelley Wong Pitts, who was with Asian American Political Alliance at UC Santa Cruz, and is Associate Professor Emerita of Education at George Mason University. Kent Wong is the Director of UCLA Labor Center. Duane Wong owned a music instrument store. Marshall Wong was staff with the Los Angeles County Human Relations Commission.
[6] Dr. Ruby Ling Louie (1931-2021) grew up in Los Angeles’ China City and was a librarian. She was a founder of Friends of Chinatown Library. Her husband, Hoover Louie (1932-) is a CPA who grew up in LA’s New Chinatown. Both dedicated much time as community leaders in Los Angeles.
[7] In 1960, La Cañada had a population of 18,000 and in 2021, 20,000. In 2021, 54% of the population is non-Hispanic White, 30% are of Asian descent, 9% Latino, and 1% African American. Current median household income is at $188,000. In 1962, Sylmar had a population of 31,000. In 2020, the population is less than 60,000 which is 80% Hispanic, 10% White, 5% Asian American, and 2% African American. Median household income in 2020 is $82,000.
[8] L.A. County’s Human Relations Commission was established to “promote positive human relations in our richly diverse, multicultural county”. It was established after the difficult 1943 Zoot Suit Riots. The County Board of Supervisors first established a “Committee for Interracial Progress.” Each of the five County Supervisors appointed three Commissioners to the 15-member Commission. Paul Louie was part of the professional staff.
[9] Paul Louie also organized help for Vietnamese and Cambodian refugees and help for the growing Armenian community in Glendale. He was an advisor when the Asian Pacific Family Center was established. He helped organized the Asian Presbyterian Caucus in 1972.
[10] John Birch Society (JBS) was established in 1958 as a far-right anti-communist organization. There were chapters in Glendale, Orange County, and Santa Barbara in the 1960s.
[11] This part of the 210 Foothill Freeway was constructed between 1971 and 1977.
[12] In 1963, California Legislature passed the Rumford Fair Housing Act which would outlaw racial covenants. William Byron Rumford was an African American pharmacist who served in the Assembly from 1949 to 1967. But in 1964, the California Real Estate Association (now California Association of Realtors) encouraged a ballot initiative to overturn the Rumford Act. Paul Louie along with many other distinguished Asian Americans established “Oriental Americans Against Proposition 14”. Proposition 14 passed in November of 1964 with a 65% vote. The California Supreme Court overturned this in 1966. For more information, see Susie Ling’s “An Important Legacy: ‘Oriental Americans Against Proposition 14’ – The Fight Against Racial Covenants” in East Wind Ezine (2023).
[13] Born Phoebe Gee near 1924 in Sacramento, she married Fook On Louie (1911-1965), an insurance broker in Los Angeles. Phoebe became one of the first Chinese American female insurance agents in the industry. Phoebe and Wallace Tom founded the Los Angeles Chinatown Democratic Club in 1959. Later, she married David Yee and was also known as Phoebe Yee.
[14] Born in 1944, Ron Wakabayashi would take leadership of the Japanese American Citizens League (JACL) from 1969 to 1971. He was also with Oriental Concern and the Asian American Drug Abuse Program. From 1981 to 1988, he served as national director of the JACL. He also served on both the Los Angeles City Human Relations Commission (1990-1995) and Director of the L.A. County Human Relations Commission (1995-1999).
[15] Peace and Freedom Party was officially established in 1967 as an alternative to the Republic and Democratic bipartisan platform. PFP “is committed to feminism, socialism, democracy, ecology, and racial equality”. AAPA was immediately part of the Third World Liberation Front (established Jan 1969) at Berkeley. Ichioka (1936-2002) came to teach Asian American studies at UCLA in 1969. Emma Gee co-edited Asian Women in 1971 and edited Counterpoint: Perspectives on Asian America in 1976.
[16] Larry Kubota wrote the article “Yellow Power” in the inaugural April 1969 issue of the Asian American Movement newspaper, Gidra. Dan and June Kuramoto were members of the jazz band Hiroshima; Dan was the first chair of Asian American studies at Cal State Long Beach. Alan Nishio was the first director of the UCLA Asian American Studies Center before rising to Vice President at Cal State Long Beach. Nishio was a leader of many Asian American organizations including National Coalition for Redress and Reparations in the 1980s. Yvonne Wong was a longtime ESL teacher; she was important to Little Friends Playgroup, a childcare center in LA Chinatown in the 1970s.
[17] Later, the Asian Education Project.
[18] Born in Hawaii, Odo (1939-2022) received his B.A. in History (Princeton, 1961), his M.A. in East Asia regional studies (Harvard, 1963), and was pursuing his PhD from Princeton on Japanese feudalism (1975). Recruited to Occidental in 1968 (until 1970), Odo would become one of the eminent scholars who developed ethnic studies. He was associated with UCLA, Cal State Long Beach, Univ of Hawaii, Columbia University, Japanese American National Museum, and the Smithsonian Institute.
[19] Yuri and Bill Kochiyama were longtime Nisei political activists headquartered in New York City. Yuri Kochiyama (1921-2014) is best known for her collaboration with Malcolm X. Kazu Ikeda (1918-2007) and Tak Iijima were founders, in 1969, of Triple A – Asian Americans for Action. Kazu was born in California and became involved in the Young Communist League while at UC Berkeley. She was also co-founder of the Oakland Nisei Democratic Club before she was interned. While in New York City, the couple were in the Japanese American Committee for Democracy. Triple A challenged Japanese American Citizens League to take a stand against the Vietnam War. Their son, Chris, was a musician in the Asian American Movement.
[20] Born in Cleveland in 1947, Omatsu grew up in East LA before getting a psychology B.A. in 1969 from UC Santa Cruz. He then went on to Yale. A longtime Asian American activist and labor organizer, Omatsu worked as Assistant Editor of Amerasia Journal from 1985 to 2002. He worked for Cal State Northridge’s Equal Opportunity Program (EOP) from 1995. Professor Omatsu taught primarily at UCLA, Cal State Northridge, and Pasadena City College.
[21] “Manongs” refers to a 1930s wave of Filipino farmworkers mostly in California.
[22] Excerpted from Jean Dere’s “A Wei Min Sister Speaks – Then and Now” in East Wind Ezine, posted near January 2021. https://eastwindezine.com/a-wei-min-sister-speaks-then-and-now-with-jean-dere/